Well this is kind of embarrassing.
This is not the post I wanted to make. I wanted to be counting down the days until the game drops, not explaining why the Valentine's Day release might not be possible.
I've been in the middle of moving houses since early November. I've mentioned this once or twice on my BlueSky, but it's taken a lot more out of me than I expected. Long story short, I've been going back and forth between the two houses for 1-2 weeks at a time, and my current setup in the new place isn't optimal. Add that in with everything that comes with moving house on top of game dev, and it's kind of been a recipe for disaster regarding my release date.
When I first put VLT up on Steam back in June, I set the release date for what I thought was more than enough time to finish the writing, programming, CGs, and polish everything to my own standards. I've always been kind of picky about the visual novels I read - if VLT isn't something that I would gush over to my friends with minimal complaints, why am I subjecting the broader Steam audience to it?
This was before I realized "hey, wow, Chapters 3-5 are really lacking in meat and need to be expanded." This is before I realized the presentation for the chapters was kind of dull, and needed some punching up. And, of course, this was before we knew we'd be closing on the new house. The game's scope has expanded for the better since June, but so has my workload and real life situation.
Right now, in its current state, Veins Like Tapeworms has:
- Almost 100,000 words in total
- 150+ CGs at least sketched, if not fully rendered
- 6 endings going full speed ahead
- 5+ Bonus Scenes
...and so on and so forth. I never thought it'd get to be this in-depth, but I wouldn't change it for the world. It's just that, until further notice, I won't be able to get substantial work on the game done for at least half my time.
All this to say: I'm tentatively setting Veins Like Tapeworms' new release date to March 17th, 2025. It's not as thematically appropriate as the yearly day of love, but you'll probably need a stiff drink after some of the darker endings. I'm not going to make any promises and say this is definitely happening and no setbacks can stop me, but March the 17th is the new day I'm aiming for.
Thanks for sticking with me over the months. We actually hit my wishlist goal on January 15th; I couldn't be more grateful to all of you who stumbled across my first "big" visual novel and saw enough potential to put it on your wishlist.
Sorry for the delay. I hope you all understand why I'm doing this. I don't want to ship a half-baked product just to meet a goal, and if the shoe was on the other foot I'd rather wait a little longer for a perfect product.